HARTFORD, Conn. — For two decades after Hartford teenager Carmen Lopez was beaten, raped and strangled, Pedro Miranda lived among her family as the trusted husband of her cousin and father of three. No one knew he was the real killer, while Lopez's boyfriend was locked up serving a 60-year sentence for her murder.
Her relatives said justice prevailed Friday, when 53-year-old Miranda was sent to prison for the rest of his life for the 1988 killing, the result of a police cold case investigation and new DNA tests. Her mother, brothers and sisters said they're still haunted by the horrific way in which she died and because they had taken Miranda into their homes and treated him like a member of the family. Lopez was 17 and seven months pregnant.
"This monster murdered the most precious person in my life beside my mom," Lopez's sister, Cindy Moran, said during the two-hour sentencing hearing in Hartford Superior Court. "He is a cold-hearted murderer that needs to be locked up and never see the light of day again."
Judge Julia Dewey sentenced Miranda to life in prison without the possibility of release, plus an extra 100 years in jail. He is also awaiting trial in connection with the murders of two other Hartford teenage girls in the 1980s. Authorities say all three killings were sexually motivated.
"I don't believe you can be rehabilitated, sir," Dewey told Miranda. "It was malicious. It was horrific. There is no other way to describe it. You snuffed out all that potential for what? Some momentary pleasure?"
Miranda, of New Britain, didn't speak at the hearing. He sat between his two lawyers at the defense table wearing an orange prison jumpsuit with his hands and legs shackled. One of his attorneys, Vicki Hutchinson, said he will be appealing his convictions for capital felony, murder and other charges, which were handed down by a jury in April.
Police working the cold case investigation arrested Miranda in December 2008 and charged him with the three killings. In the months that followed, Carmen's boyfriend, Miguel Roman, was freed from prison and exonerated. The murder cases were reopened after the state public defenders' Connecticut Innocence Project unveiled new evidence in the Lopez case, and new DNA tests linked Miranda to all three teen deaths, police said.
Roman's daughter, Ana, sat next to her father in court Friday and read his statement. He wrote that serving 20 years of a 60-year prison sentence tore him away from his family, and he missed his parents' deaths and his three children's childhoods.
"I would lie awake at night and think of my family outside and what was happening to them. All I could do was pray to God to take care of my family," he wrote. "I always believed that one day the truth would come out and people would know I didn't commit this terrible crime."
Lopez disappeared after leaving a family party in January 1988. She told her cousin that she was going to meet Roman, an arrest warrant said. Her battered body was found a few days later in a Hartford apartment where she had been house-sitting. The warrant said Miranda knew from other family members that Lopez would be alone in the apartment.
Roman, who was not the father of Lopez's unborn child, was later convicted of her death, despite an FBI investigator testifying that tests eliminated him as a suspect. The jury convicted him based on circumstantial evidence and witness testimony, authorities said.
Two decades later, new DNA tests on evidence found in the apartment excluded Roman as a suspect. The DNA samples from the apartment matched a sample Miranda was forced to give authorities after he was convicted in 1998 for raping a 24-year-old woman in West Hartford.
Miranda is also charged with the murders of 16-year-old Rosa Valentin in 1986 and 13-year-old Mayra Cruz in 1987. Valentin's body was never found, and prosecutor David Zagaja urged Miranda on Friday to let her family know what happened to her.
Miranda continues to insist on his innocence in all three cases.
Lopez's mother, Ana Lopez, described her daughter as a cheerful young woman who liked to spend time with her family, dreamed of being a good mother and loved to dance. A court official translated for Ana Lopez as she spoke in Spanish.
"Pedro Miranda committed a sacrilege against three families," she said. "The court should protect society from a predator who would continue to attack women like my daughter Carmen Lopez."
Ana Lopez said her family was devastated by Carmen's death. She said the only keepsakes she had of her daughter were pictures that were destroyed in a fire at the family's home.
The state's Innocence Project, formed in 2005 to look into potentially wrong convictions, has also helped free two other Connecticut men who were sent to prison for crimes they didn't commit. James Tillman was released from a state prison in 2006 after serving 18 years for rape. In 2009, Kenneth Ireland was set free after serving two decades for murder and rape.